Look, old person writing for NPR, let me fill you in on some developments you may have missed since deciding to only come in for one hour a day when you were given your journalistic tenure in 1975:

In the 1980s, an international network of computerized devices capable of near-instantaneous transmission of text data was conceptualized and implemented by some nerds. Over the '90s it gradually proliferated, until essentially the entire nation had some level of regular exposure to the medium in the late '90s.

In the early 2000s this mysterious newfangled interweaving of obscure and arcane shiat beyond the comprehension of mere mortals (much like the blinking 12:00 on your Betamax player) matured into a fairly reliable rapid-dissemination informational network, rapidly distributing news, commentary, and pornography to basically anyone with any level of interest whatsoever, free of the previous geographical restrictions on such things. By 2007 or so, most people could and did easily simply type things like "Obama 2008 campaign platform" into a digital indexing service called a 'search engine' and receive not only a list of literally everything anyone in the entire world had written on the subject, but a list of current and older news citations sorted by relevance in an impressively reliable fashion.

Further, by 2010 the majority of the population could get constant updates on any subject of their choosing, again form basically any source they like without the old "you have to wait for the paper, and you only get what your local paper wants to tell you" paradigm you're used to, grandpa. This means that a press release in, say, a GOP district directed at supporters could easily make its way to a registered Democrat in San Jose if it mentioned something he'd thought to add to his search terms. This meant that no one had to wait for an analyst to do basic investigative reporting and dredge through all the campaign materials for them and present the highlights, they could easily do it in ten minutes during their coffee break. From their phone.

As of 2009, most political campaigns have adapted to this, and release their materials early and with great frequency, and most voters have similarly adapted to gradually learn about the candidates for most national and state (at least) elections, instead of having to wait for the TV debates (now literally years later than the beginning of the campaigns) to find out what the candidates stand for. This is by now so easy that pre-teens not only can, but routinely do become more politically informed than anyone outside an actual campaign office on a regular basis, six months or more before any debating is even planned.

In short, we drink and play games during the debate because the only people that haven't made up their minds by this point are, by modern standards, so damningly, terminally farking stupid that they're bound to die of forgetting how to breathe any day now. For the rest of us, who like everyone with an IQ of 55+ have already picked our candidates for every national race, the debates are a chance to relax, hang out, and root for our chosen horse a bit, which we can do without devaluing the race's importance at all because for non-trisomy patients all the important parts of the campaign concluded over a month ago.

//Short version: The author of TFA is pretty clearly too stupid to live. I expect it will be impossible to read his inevitable obituary without wincing. I'll put a few bucks on him somehow managing to choke on a roomba upon mistaking it for a belt-onion or something similar.

People play these games as a tacit reminder that most of our politics are useless, relying on stupid phrases and talking points. That's always been the case, but in those days we had a press with teeth that would call bullsh*t.

Anyone else find it creepy the rent-a-quote expert they found to denounce drinking games kept using the term 'legal alchohol limit' as if that was a thing? If you aren't operating a motor vehicle or drunk in public, there is no such thing.